Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 34, Band 34) - Softcover

Strier, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520209052 ISBN 13: 9780520209053

Verlag: University of California Press, 1997

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Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must—or cannot—say or do.

The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Strier is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983) and the coeditor, with Heather Dubrow, of The Historical Renaissance: New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (1988).

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"Resistant Structures manages to be both stunning and sensible. . . .The book is an erudite, sensitive, and theoretically provocative experiment in political criticism, at once radical and rigorous, which will be of lasting value to all students of English Renaissance literature."—Debora Shuger, author of The Renaissance Bible

"These essays have a cumulative and exemplary force, which is due to Strier's knowlege, his intelligence, the clarity of his writing, and the honesty of his procedures."—Paul Alpers, author of Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral

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"Resistant Structures manages to be both stunning and sensible. . . .The book is an erudite, sensitive, and theoretically provocative experiment in political criticism, at once radical and rigorous, which will be of lasting value to all students of English Renaissance literature." Debora Shuger, author of The Renaissance Bible

"These essays have a cumulative and exemplary force, which is due to Strier's knowlege, his intelligence, the clarity of his writing, and the honesty of his procedures." Paul Alpers, author of Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral

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Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts

By Richard Strier

University of California Press

Copyright 1997 Richard Strier
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520209052
Essay 1
"Tradition"

In the collective memory or mythology of literary studies in America, the clash between Rosemond Tuve and William Empson in the early 1950s is an episode in the conflict between "history" and "formalism." My strong impression is that most scholars of English Renaissance literature still think of Tuve as having "won" the debate with Empson. It is my further impression that Rosemond Tuve is still regarded as an excellent model of true (or at least, solid) scholarship anddepending on one's attitudes toward the current sceneof either "old" or "real" historicism. Empson, of course. . . . Well, everyone knows about Empson.

I mean to argue that this episode is improperly described as a conflict between "formalism" and "history." I will try to show that what was really at issue was a particular conception of historical knowledge and its role in literary studies. My main concern is not to praise Empson in this essaythough I will do sobut to criticize in some detail the position in the controversy taken by Tuve. I will praise Empson not just as the better "reader," but as the better historicistas if these virtues could truly be separated. I will argue that Tuve is a bad model for historicism, that her appeal to historical data, and especially her appeal to and understanding of "tradition," are actually quite pernicious. Kenneth Burke, with typical wit and typical generosity, has a brilliant joke about the controversy, a joke that capaciously embraces both Empson and Tuve. "Criticism," concludes Burke, "should be for both Dis-a and

Data."1 Brilliant as it is, I am afraid that I think Burke's joke grants too much to Tuve. I will show that Empson's joke about the controversy, which I will recount and discuss later, is as profound (and as funny) as Burke's and points to a serious problem with Tuve's conception of Data. Tuve, of course, does not make jokes. She is much too busy, as we shall see, holding the fort against modernity.

Before turning to the details of the controversy, let me say a few words about Empson. It may seem outrageously paradoxical to suggest him as a model for historical criticism. Tuve attacked the final analysis in Seven Types of Ambiguity , and "everyone knows" about Empson and ambiguity.2 Everyone feels secure in the knowledge of what kind of critic Empson was, and what sort of book Seven Types is. Empson was a New Critic, and Seven Types is a book of "readings." To call Empson a New Critic is to ally him with Cleanth Brooks and Seven Types with The Well Wrought Urn .3 Empson's practice is formalist, internalist, anti-intentionalist, and antihistoricist. This view of Empson, though I think still widely held, is entirely, even spectacularly wrong.4 The best readers of Empson, whether they approve of him or not, have long recognized that to view him as a doctrinaire or normative New Critic is wrong. To take two important cases, Ren Wellek, who disapproved of Empson, and Paul de Man, who highly approved of him, both recognized this.5 The difference between Empson and the other "formalists," especially I. A. Richards and Roland Barthes, is the central argument of de Man's famous essay on "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism." In the Hegelian language of his early thinking, de Man credits Empson with philosophical correctnesswith understanding "the deep division of

See Kenneth Burke, "On Covery, Re- and Dis-," Accent 13 (1959): 225. For those to whom the Brooklyn pronunciation of "this" and "that" as "dis" and "dat" is not immediately familiar, the joke is thereby explained. "Dis-a" stands for the particular; "Data," presumably, needs no explanation.

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse (1930; 2d ed., rev., 1947; 3d ed., New York: Meridien Books, 1955). I have used the third edition.

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947).

This is also observed in Paul H. Fry, William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991), 7.

Ren Wellek, "Literary Theory, Criticism, and History," in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 89; Paul de Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism" (1954), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism , 2d. ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 22945.

Being itself"and with opening the way to genuine historicism, to "the sorrowful time of patience, i.e., history."6

Empson's historicism will be treated at some length in this essay, but it might be well to say a word here about his supposed obsession with the "purely verbal," and about his supposed anti-intentionalism.7 Elder Olson's 1952 essay, "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction," is the classic attack.8 Olson severely rebukes the myopia of Empson's focus on "diction." This attack, however, founders on the recognition that Empson was interested in "ambiguity" only because he saw this feature of language as a probable indicator of something elsenamely, of "interesting and valuable situations" being addressed or embodied in a text.9 It was these "situations" in which he was really interested. Olson mocks this talk about situations, but then goes on himself to speak of the importance of seeing speeches in plays as by "a certain character in a certain situation."10 In response to Olson, Empson remarks, somewhat bemusedly (and correctly), that what Olson means by "literary effect" is included in what he, Empson, means by "meaning."11 As for anti-intentionalism, Empson notes in his generally positive review of The Well Wrought Urn that he finds Brooks overly concerned with purely formal qualities to the exclusion of political and biographical realism.12 And in a review of William K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon in

"The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 237, 245. In his later essay on "Wordsworth and the Victorians" (1979), de Man praises Empson as an ethical model for deconstructionists, as someone whose work shows "the tact with which such a potentially mischievous task should be carried out." See The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 88.

On Empson as an anti-intentionalist, see E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 22425. Hirsch bases his sense of Empson and "the critical school Empson founded" on a phrase ("piece of language") in the first paragraph of Seven Types of Ambiguity (!), and on the understanding of Empson produced by the Chicago Aristotelians (see n. 8 below).

Elder Olson, "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction," in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 4582. Olson's critique of Empson depends on viewing Empson as a typical "new critic," essentially identical with Cleanth Brooks. In the context of Critics and Criticism, Olson's essay stands between and links Crane's critiques of Richards and of Brooks.

Olson, "William Empson," 50; Empson, Seven Types , 266.

Olson, "William Empson," 56.

"The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520209052
• ISBN 13: 9780520209053
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar